The Internet loves it some Throwback Thursday, and Primary Colors is no different. So every Thursday we'll be digging through the recent past to reacquaint you with some of the stupid votes that have landed Democratic members of Congress on our Targeted Democrats list.
Today we bring you NY-24 Rep. Dan Maffei's vote for the great GOP shutdown of 2013.
We're singling out Dan Maffei because he represents a safe D+5 district. The only other D+5 Republicans hold (and they don't hold anything more liberal) is really a fluke of California's top-two primary, so Maffei is not facing a serious threat from a Republican challenger. Steven Horsford also really has no excuse, representing a relatively safe D+4 district, but back to Maffei:
With the federal government on the brink of its first shutdown in 17 years, U.S. Rep. Dan Maffei said he faced a difficult choice Monday night.
Maffei, D-Syracuse, had to vote on a third House Republican attempt to link a routine budget bill -- one to keep the government open -- to rollbacks and delays in the nation's new health care law.
At 8:40 p.m., with less than 3 ½ hours until the shutdown, Maffei decided to break ranks, becoming one of only nine House Democrats in the nation to vote for the bill.
So everybody knew that this was the government shutdown vote. That was very clear to everyone who was paying attention in the lead up to this thing. We were at the brink. If the bill passed the House, the government was going to shut down. And Maffei voted for it.
But when the hometown newspaper asked him about it, he tried to pretend he didn't know it would result in a government shutdown:
Maffei said he disappointed House Democratic leaders and some of his supporters with his vote. But he insisted it was a good-faith attempt to reach a compromise, even if the president and Senate leaders had rejected the idea in advance.
"Some people thought I voted to shut the government down, which is absurd," Maffei said in an interview Tuesday.
His own party campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, made the same accusation Tuesday against Republicans who voted for the bill.
The DCCC began a paid, automated telephone campaign in the neighboring Central New York district of Rep. Richard Hanna, accusing the Oneida County Republican of forcing the government shutdown.
Again, everybody knew this was the shutdown vote. And Dan Maffei helped step all over the DCCC's message by failing to hold together with the team to make this a party-line vote that would've made it even clearer to voters which party was to blame.
Eight other Democrats voted for the bill, three of whom are on our target list: Jim Matheson, Mike McIntyre, Ron Barber, John Barrow, Steven Horsford, Sean Maloney , Raul Ruiz, and Krysten Sinema.
We already mentioned Steven Horsford, who also doesn't have a strong excuse. Sean Maloney is in an even district, and Krysten Sinema is in an R+1, so those make a little more sense
But check it out: we knew in advance that voters were primed to blame Republicans more than Democrats for the shutdown, and then that was exactly what happened.
We really don't care when Democrats break with the party on issues where the progressive position is unpopular locally. All we are asking is that House Democrats hang together with progressives on votes where the liberal position is actually popular. But there was nothing popular about the GOP shutdown, so this is just one reason why Dan Maffei deserves a primary challenge in 2016.